David Henkin
speaker
45 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
David Henkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, at this point, it's a global timekeeping system. There are no major societies that I know about that don't count regular, continuous cycles of seven days. But that wouldn't have been true if you had asked me this question 200 years ago or even 100 years ago.
Hello, Mike. How are you?
The week has always fascinated me and partly why the week is because the week is a completely artificial unit of time. It's not really, uh, uh, based on any natural observable natural phenomenon. And it's not as a fraction, neat fraction of any other larger unit of time. It's totally conventional. Lots of parts of the world never had it.
So I've always been fascinated with this weird thing that is the week. We sort of made it up. You can't see it. You can't figure out by looking at the skies if you've lost track of it. And lots of societies did just fine with that one. But we're so attached to it. So I've always been curious as to what it does for us or what it does to us to have this very peculiar time unit in our lives.
Yeah, I'd say at this point, it's a global timekeeping system. There are no major societies that I know about that don't count regular continuous cycles of seven days. But that wouldn't have been true if you had asked me this question 200 years ago or even 100 years ago.
Lots of societies have not counted seven-day cycles or not counted continuous seven-day cycles or only had cycles that were fractions of of lunar months or things like that, or didn't care about the number seven at all.
It seems to have two origins. I'd say the primary origin is Jewish, the Jewish Sabbath practice. So to have a Sabbath count required that you maintain that weekly cycle, that's one origin. The Romans also observed a planetary week where they identified each day of a seven-day cycle with one of the planets, including the sun and the moon as planets.
That's where we get names like Sunday, Monday, Moonday, Tuesday, which is different, Mars, etc. So those are the two origins. And those two calendar systems kind of met in the Roman Empire. And then... initially through Christianity, spread to other parts of the world, but not instantly and not evenly over the course of the next 2,000 years.
Right. I mean, you know, you could interpret that as it's been imposed on all of us, or you could interpret it as I think your question implies, that there's some special utilities and special value to having a seven-day cycle. Having a seven-day cycle doesn't necessarily mean that you rest one or two days out of seven, though that's typically how it's used.
But yeah, counting cycles of seven days lasts. So whether it lasts because it's been imposed or because of habit or because of utility, I think is an interesting question.
Well, there was and there wasn't within the Bible, right? The Bible says that God rests on day seven, but doesn't say that then God observes a cycle of seven days. It doesn't say then every seven days God rests, and doesn't say that therefore people rested every seven days. And it's not clear from Genesis.
I mean, if you just read the Bible from the beginning, you'd have no sense by the end of Genesis that the story at the beginning is going to lead to a calendar of seven days. You might think that if people wanted to commemorate God's rest on the seventh day, they'd rest on the seventh day of every lunar month or the seventh day of every year.
It's only later in the Bible that there begins to be some sense that that story of creation could be linked to a calendar. So the creation story is part of the meaning of the Sabbath for Jews and for Christians too, but it's not clear that that is like the beginning of it. It's not clear that just because there was a creation story in which God rested on the seventh day that therefore people
I think it fills different needs and different purposes depending how it's used. I mean, not all societies that have observed the week have made it into a cycle of work and rest, but that is a primary thing that the seven-day week does for people is it prescribes a regular rhythm of taking off from work.
as we all know and complain about, most of us don't actually really get to take off one or let alone two days work every seven days. But that's one thing that it could do for us. But it does all kinds of other things as well. What interests me is that in the modern American experience of the week from the early 19th century on, it enables us to schedule things. It enables us to schedule activities
with friends, with family, and with strangers in certain patterns so that we wind up doing things every seven days or a certain number of times every seven days or at a certain rhythm every 14 days or every 21 or 20.
I mean, there's nothing that we do in patterns of five days or 13 days, but there are all kinds of things that we do in patterns of seven, and that enables us to schedule things with other people.
And the cool thing is that some of those things are very, very general, right? They're communal, they're shared, like all of us do a certain kind of thing on one day of the week. And some of them are very idiosyncratic. You know, your Tuesday and my Tuesday could be super different depending on
what our therapy schedule was, or when our gym was open, or what kinds of sports we like to watch, or whether we had a custody arrangement with a co-parent. There are all these very individualistic things that create our sense of our Tuesday.
I totally share your experience. In some ways, what got me interested in the week was my inability to explain exactly what that feeling was. And the Seinfeld episode to which you refer, if I remember correctly, the only thing that I think is odd about it is it makes Kramer sort of seem unusual or bizarre for thinking that days of the week have a feel.
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